I really like that xmpp is experiencing a sort of revival at the moment.

Not maybe in terms of user-base, but Conversations for android is really good, on iOS ChatSecure has some issues, but is usable. OTR encryption is being replaced by OMEMO, and that actually works. I can use and try out clients to my hearts content, with messages being synchronized between them.

That I can run my own server on prosody or ejabberd is really great as well.

And since we're back to "Hey can we you use Signal/Threema/Whatsapp/Viber ?" anyhow, it's actually relatively easy to slide in the next option:

"Hmmm, why don't we use ChatSecure ?"

Thanks everyone for making it happen.

Conversations reached a point where I can easily install it on my family member phones and they feel it's a "normal" messenger. This doesn't sound like a high bar to reach but surprisingly it didn't happen before (at least for XMPP).

Recently a spin-off of Conversations - Quicksy was introduced [0] [1] that makes the entry even easier as it offers phone number-based contact discovery. From my experience people are used to quick on-boardings and don't even want to think about things like "username" and looking for contacts.

[0]: https://quicksy.im/

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.quicksy.cli...

> it didn't happen before (at least for XMPP).

It was the niche of niches but the Nokia n900's standard built in xmpp client could do voice/video/filetransfer with a gnome desktop's standard messaging infrastructure (telepathy or something?) in what, like 2010 ?

But, besides that, I get what you're saying about "normal" messengers and conversations nowadays.

So good. Thanks Mr. Gultsch[0] !

[0] https://gultsch.de/

While I understand the concerns and I appreciate all of what Conversations' author is doing for the community, other clients have also seen significant improvements lately.

Gajim[0] has practically come back from the "dead". There is a huge difference, UI/UX-wise but not just, between pre and post 1.0, (1.1 at the time of writing, 1.2 coming).

There is also dino[1], a nice and simple desktop client, and converse.js[2], a fast-developing web-client.

Movim[3] and Salut-à-Toi[4] are also putting in a lot of work on the social network side.

[0]: https://gajim.org

[1]: https://dino.im

[2]: https://conversejs.org

[3]: https://movim.eu

[4]: https://salut-a-toi.org

Edit: Added conversejs

- https://github.com/danielkraic/Pidgin-XEP-0136-plugin adds XEP-0136 (needs "mam_archive" on prosody)

- https://github.com/gkdr/carbons adds XEP-0280 (Carbons)

- https://github.com/Junker/purple-xmpp-http-upload adds XEP-363 (HTTP uploads)

- https://github.com/gkdr/lurch adds XEP-0384 (OMEMO)

- https://github.com/noonien-d/pidgin-xmpp-receipts XEP-0184 (message delivery receipts)

The real pain for Pidgin is the complete lack of XEP-313 due to Pidgin's aged logging system, and I would really like to see a working message sync for Pidgin :(

EDIT: https://github.com/CkNoSFeRaTU/pidgin apparently has had XEP-313 patched into Pidgin for years now. Combined with lurch and Carbons, message sync is working fine.